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SANDPOINT — City council members took a moment of silence at Wednesday’s meeting for the lives lost in the COVID-19 pandemic. As happened several times before in council meetings, that moment came at the request of Councilwoman Deb Ruehle.

At Wednesday night’s meeting, though, something was different. Following Ruehle’s request, Mayor Shelby Rognstad told council members he had his own story to share.

“My wife’s grandmother passed away this morning,” he said.

She did not die of COVID-19, although she contracted it in her stay at a hospital, he said. Instead, she had gone for a hip replacement, and because too many people needed help, she was not able to get the attention she needed.

His grandmother-in-law, Rognstad said, had instead died from bed sores that became infected when hospital staff were unable to attend to her as frequently as was needed.

“It demonstrates how impactful this is, and I would encourage all of us to take personal responsibility,” Rognstad said. “It [also] affects those who need the healthcare system for other reasons.”

Also at the meeting that night, the council approved the final Watershed Management Plan for the Little Sand Creek Watershed.

Since the watershed management plan’s introduction in a council meeting last month, a few changes were made to provide more clarity on issues including the role of neighboring properties, said Public Works Director Amanda Wilson.

The water management plan would only address city-owned property, Wilson said, however, in the future the city may work with neighboring landowners to ensure best practices are being met.

Those agreements would likely be most important with private entities, as the watershed guidelines the city has in place are already based on best practices from federal forestry programs.

Other changes included removing language about non-forest road, as the city does not intend to add a primary road within the watershed.

The council also voted to accept the findings from the Fire Services Operational Assessment and Feasibility Study conducted by Fitch and Associates LLC.

Although the council only voted to accept the operational assessment and feasibility study, which would in turn allow the formation of a steering committee, some aspects of the recommendations provided in that study raised concerns for council members including Andy Groat and John Darling.

The biggest point of contention concerned a recommendation by Fitch and Associates that the battalion chiefs be removed from the firefighting union’s collective bargaining agreement to avoid being in the same agreement as the employees they serve.

“I’m concerned with the battalion chief scenario that they would have to leave the union,” Darling said. “[Once the committee is formed], I am going to challenge for some data-driven information and some statistics.”

Lastly, the council heard a presentation by City Administrator Jennifer Stapleton on plans for upgrades to the council chambers.

One of the reasons for the remodel is to improve the experience for members of the public, Stapleton said.

Currently, the council dias is located on an elevated section of the room where the ceiling drops low. That causes challenges with sound movement in the room, she said, and makes it hard for attendants in the back of the room to hear what’s being said.

The new plan proposes moving the dias to the back of the room, which provides for better sound movement and more emergency evacuation options.

It also provides for more accessibility should future council members ever need ADA accommodations, which are currently not possible with the chamber’s layout.

The new plan would also include two windows into the chamber, a presentation screen behind the council’s dias and individual screens for council members to view presentations.

In addition to these changes, the plan would include updated video and sound equipment to help with digital participation.

“The sound equipment [is] now about 15 years old, so it is antiquated,” Stapleton said.

Many of the electronics will be funded with CARES Act money, Stapleton said.

Council meetings would be moved to city hall while remodeling is underway, Stapleton said, with the hope that the updates would be done in time for reopening the meetings to in-person attendance by the public.